Tag Archives: Music

I recently ripped a bunch of my CDs to my PC again with the express intent of putting them onto Google Play so I could play them anywhere. Having listened to them this week I was shocked to discover that Google is censoring my music!

Whilst listening to The Willing Well III – Apollo II: The Telling Truth by Coheed and Cambria I noticed there were gaps. At first I thought the rip had failed, so I listened to the original MP3 and soon realised that the word “whore” was being cut out. The line goes;

Just come look at what your brother did
To that girl’s precious little whore of a body now

A delightful song, as you can see.

Then today, it happened again… this time the word it stripped out was – shock horror – “die”. Yes, really. The line is;

I hope you die right now

Again, delightful song. Again, Coheed and Cambria but this time the song was Upon Your Dead Body.

Somehow Google thinks that censoring my music is fine. That I shouldn’t listen to music about whores, death and dying.

I realised this probably isn’t some sort of automated censoring as, when playing favourite tune Make Yourself by Incubus, there was no censoring of these lines;

If you let them fuck you, there will be no foreplay.
If I fuck me, I’ll fuck me in my own way.

Liking my taste in music yet?

So I tried to find out why Google has deemed itself arbiter of taste and decency. Predictably, there was nothing in their help section but a quick Google found plenty of people discovering the same thing (apparently their “matching” feature often matches the ‘clean’ version of songs) and even a solution.

Can I really be arsed (censor that, fuckwits!) to go through every censored song to get rid of those ridiculous gaps though?

Why is Google even doing this? Censoring the word “die” FFS! What am I gonna do, listen to the song and then go on a murderous rampage? Comments are open…

Does Amazon does this? If it weren’t for their foolish reliance on Flash I’d be using their Cloud Player instead…

I’m a massive Spotify fan. It’s like listening to commercial radio but without self-obsessed DJs tranting about their bowel movements and the same stream of adverts for double glazed windows. Plus, you make up the playlist. Listening to Spotify, unlike any radio station means I can listen to lots of different music, not the same drab playlist 5 times a day.

I can put up with the odd advert in exchange for having a massive collection of music at my fingertips without the need for a cargo container full of hard drives. It’s a damn good deal.

£9.99 to get rid of those adverts isn’t though. Think about it.

When my friend Nick told me he’d subscribed my immediate reaction was, why? For the same amount you could download about 30-40 tracks from eMusic (it’s not like hard drive space is expensive either – most PCs will have plenty of room for a few thousand tracks) and using services like Orb it’s easy to access that music anywhere – including on a mobile phone (like my beloved #JournoPhone).

Which brings me nicely onto the reason Spotify won’t ‘revolutionise’ the industry as many would have us believe. It’s too closed. You can access it on any PC or Mac that has it installed but not on your phone. Those with jail broken iPhones will be able to soon but the rest won’t – and it’ll be a long time before it gets to other phones, if at all.

You can’t easily transport your playlists either. I was at a friend’s house recently and wanted to find some songs off my playlists but the only way to do so was log into my account, open a text file and copy/paste the link to my playlists. Where’s the API? Where’s the web site where I can log in and view, edit, delete and generally screw with my playlists? Where’s the follow feature so I can see when my friends with similar taste create a new playlist or listen to one of mine?

Oh, there’s a C API. Brilliant! That means that all those thousands of C programmers out there can make….. more desktop apps. That’s…… good.

Dear Spotify, give us web dev types an API and we’ll give people more of a reason to actually pay £9.99 a month and then maybe you won’t be missing your revenue targets!

You know, I’m also starting to see a lot more tie-in with Last.fm so maybe I should be directing my requests at CBS? Go on, guys, buy Spotify and add lots of social features to it. If you don’t I’m gonna go write a kick ass business plan and go find some trusting VCs…. then Spotify will be your competitor!